Interview: Peter Carey

Peter Carey talks to Tom Leonard about his rollicking new period novel, Parrot
and Olivier, set in 19th-century America

By Tom Leonard

6:30AM GMT 06 Feb 2010

There is surely an iron rule of literature that an expat author living in the United States who writes anything remotely critical about the place ends up having his passport examined by the sole member of the US immigration service who has read the book. Quite what the officer will have to say to Peter Carey about his latest novel may depend on whether he has also read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

Americans often cite the French aristocrat’s 1830s study of the US as an affirmation of the strength of their democratic system. That this was not the whole story, and that de Tocqueville expressed fears about the brave new world across the Atlantic, is the intellectual core of Carey’s beautifully written and enormously enjoyable new book, Parrot and Olivier in America. The novel is a fictionalised account of the journey that spawned de Tocqueville’s book: when the French nobleman and his English servant set out to take the temperature of the US.

The Australian writer – with J M Coetzee one of only two authors to have won the Booker Prize twice, once for Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and again for True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) – has lived in New York for 20 years. It takes some foreign visitors to the US five minutes before they write about their host country, but Carey was in no hurry.

“I thought the opposite. When I wrote The Kelly Gang, I thought, ‘Oh that’s good, I don’t have to do what all my friends are saying and write about America, I can just keep on writing about Australia,’” he says.

But he could not maintain that detachment. “You live here and there are some things that tend to engage your passions. You are at once part of it – and I love this city – but not of it, and you can refer to ‘them’ and ‘us’ in the same breath.”

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He was thrilled to discover that he and de Tocqueville had shared passions. “Everyone talks about de Tocqueville as the posh French fella who really understood democracy and, as you start to listen, you start to think, ‘Hang on a second, he was not necessarily the greatest supporter of what was happening in this country.’ And then you read Democracy in America and you find him talking about all sorts of things he was worried about.”

One issue on which they agree is democracy’s baleful effect on art – what Carey calls the “great dumbing-down of culture”. Carey lays the blame for what he calls “democratic capitalism” principally with the US. “This is something we all live with every day. And if we’re concerned about it we get angry and frightened, and we go to a bookstore or a movie and we’re appalled and we feel differently than how we felt in the Sixties when somebody of my age thought that popular culture and good culture could be the same thing.” And so when de Tocqueville “is talking about people in America not valuing art, he’s talking about hedge-fund managers competing to pay the biggest amount of money for a Jeff Koons”.

He argues that the Frenchman was similarly spot on in his fear of American democracy’s potential to spawn tyrannical government, or at least government by populist idiots. “He has that great terror of the majority which, at first, sounds dumb to us and reactionary. And then you realise that you’re sitting here and there’s Sarah Palin – maybe about to be vice president when I was writing this – and you look at George Bush, and you see that the sort of thing de Tocqueville’s talking about is exactly this.”

Even if there are evidently some intellectual axes being ground, the reader hardly notices since it is done so stylishly. All Carey’s traditional strengths are here in abundance: rich and meticulously researched detail, a soaring imagination, wonderfully inventive imagery and, most welcome of all, a caustic wit that only peters out when our two heroes start to like each other.

The book is narrated alternately by Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont, sickly, rarefied and reactionary, and Parrot, a socialist, art-loving and mercilessly sarcastic printer (“a very Australian Englishman,” Carey says). Olivier is the de Tocqueville figure: both sailed to the US to investigate its prisons and then widened their investigations into American politics and society. Scarred by the French Revolution, Olivier is understandably less enthusiastic about the rule of the people than is Parrot. He is also a snob whose delicate sensibilities suffer among his unsophisticated hosts.

Parrot, so named because of his red hair, has led a restless life of dislocation, hardship and disappointment. Predictably, he grasps the opportunities of America more enthusiastically than Olivier and sees only the good in its egalitarianism. But that doesn’t mean he is right. The American dream trouncing European snobbery is not what Carey has in mind. Both men are correct about the US, and Olivier possibly more so. “We are swimming in a sea of cultural crap – it’s true,” Carey says. But the writer – who likes America, or at least New York – is anxious not to be too negative about the country. When he notes that “a slightly insecure boastfulness and unashamed materialism” are two other American traits that have not changed since de Tocqueville’s day, he quickly adds that Australians are just as guilty on both counts.

It is rare to read a 450-page book where one doesn’t feel it could have done with tighter editing. I couldn’t say that of Parrot and Olivier. That said, the danger of having alternate narrators is that a reader inevitably enjoys one more than the other. Carey is more entertaining as Parrot. He counters that he “got a lot of pleasure out of writing Olivier – I love his snobbishness, his exasperation with things… and it’s so far beyond my experience in life that it’s a great pleasure to feel you can walk out there and bring it off”. Besides, the writer’s job, he adds, is to “act like an attorney for both of them… when you feel that a writer’s stacked something up against a character, it always feels really bad to me”.

Born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, where his parents ran a car dealership, Carey – now 66 – worked for years in advertising, including in London. He moved to New York in 1990 with his second wife, Alison Summers, and his son to teach creative writing at New York University. Today he shares a stylish flat – open-plan emptiness broken up by large abstract expressionist paintings – in the hip Manhattan neighbourhood of SoHo with his third wife, Frances Coady, a British publisher.

His writing generally steers clear of his own life, yet it intruded rather dramatically after the publication in 2006 of Theft: a Love Story. Summers, a theatre director who was with Carey for around 20 years before a painful divorce, complained publicly that he had written her into the story as a grasping alimony seeker referred to in the text as The Plaintiff. She accused Carey of poisoning their Manhattan literary friends against her. Predictably, the accusation about writing her into the book still riles Carey. “It’s bull----… you should read it,” he mutters. He lists half a dozen ways in which his ex-wife differed from his character. Has it all been resolved? “The best resolution of the dispute would be for people to read the book,” Carey adds. “I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don’t know how to do it.”

Instead, where he excels is in “making things up”, he says. “One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don’t permit you to do that.”

‘Parrot and Olivier in America’ is published by Faber & Faber at £18.99